Serena Software Adds Deployment Hub to Release Manager

The whole point of embracing an agile software development methodology is to increase the speed at which applications are moved into production. The challenge is that increasing the number of applications and updates can easily overwhelm an IT operations team, which inevitably leads to a catastrophic failure that winds up taking an application offline.

Looking to help organizations strike a balance between agile development and the integrity of the IT operations, Serena Software today updated its application release management software, which now includes a deployment hub capability that integrates Serena Release Manager with both Serena and third-party IT automation tools.

Img Credit: Serena.com

According to Greg Sikes, vice president and general manager for Serena Release Manager, version 5.0 of Serena Release Manager represents a significant step toward reining in a lot of the chaos that typifies DevOps today. Rather than forcing IT organizations to rip and replace existing processes, Serena Release Manager leverages RESTful APIs to integrate the management of the application release cycle with any set of automation tools the IT organization has decided to standardize on, Sikes says.

Other new features in Serena Release Manager 5.0 include support for real-time activity feeds between developers and IT operations teams, and dashboards that make it easier to track key performance indicators. IT organizations can opt to use version 5.0's runbooks to create a standard way of handing off new releases to the IT operations team.

No one would argue that agile development has not had a positive impact on IT. But like many things, too much of a good thing can be bad. Many organizations embraced agile development without considering the impact it would have on their IT operations processes. All too often, the end result has been the crash of an application that the IT operations team didn’t have time to properly vet before being deployed.

Once that occurs, there’s a tendency to pull back from agile development methodologies simply because no one took the time to modernize the IT operations process. That lack of coordination has led to the creation of a DevOps crisis that is playing out across countless IT organizations.

Getting all this right typically requires some intervention on the part of senior-level management. In the absence of that leadership, however, developers are forcing the issue by increasing the cadence of releases whether the IT operations team is ready or not.